Too bad that "Here's Looking at You, Warner Brothers" (7 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday on TNT cable), a tribute to the famed filmmaking family, only hints at something central to the studio's evolution. The force that fueled creative fires also precipitated horrific battles between the Warner brother named Jack and very nearly everyone else in Hollywood, including the Warner brothers named Harry, Sam and Abe.

Writer-producer-director Robert Guenette ("Victory at Entebbe," "The Man Who Saw Tomorrow") makes no apologies. The documentary was, after all, a Warner Brothers commission.

"What happened was that the head of the studio suddenly got religion about the studio's history. It was being lost," Guenette says. "We do allude to the fights, some of Jack Warner's more peculiar acts. He did do some strange things."

But Guenette's greatest challenge was to screen eight decades of film and then decide what to include.

The brothers Warner began making films of their own in 1912 and signed their first big star, John Barrymore, five years later.

It would take them 20 years to win the first of five best-picture Oscars ("The Life of Emile Zola" in 1937), but on Oct. 6, 1927, they changed the course of moviemaking with the release of "The Jazz Singer."

But Guenette's project reaches outside simple chronology to try to reflect the studio's "personality," a peppery blend dominated by Jack Warner but mellowed by the likes of Hal Wallace and sweetened by Leon Schlesinger's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.

With Clint Eastwood, Barbra Streisand, Chevy Chase, Goldie Hawn and Steven Spielberg as guides, we glimpse the Zanuck and Wallace eras, see just enough of that "explosive little broad," Bette Davis, to whet our appetites and meet the studio's earliest incarnation of Bugs Bunny, little more than Daffy Duck in a rabbit suit.

"Here's Looking at You, Warner Brothers" is a fun way to spend a couple of weekend hours, and that's the way Guenette thinks it should be.

"Documentaries ought to be non-fiction entertainment, (but) what frequently happens in their name are erudite, stuffy programs that don't even have propaganda value," Guenette says. "It's a matter of the converted talking to the converted. What I want to do is find out how I and my audience can have a good time."